Monthly Archives: May 2015

They love Cardinal Kasper in American faux-catholic academia. He was unloading at Georgetown recently. The go-to source for all things Francis, Jesuit AmericaMag, has the report.

Cardinal Walter Kasper offered the highlight speech of this Memorial Day weekend’s Georgetown University/Marymount University conference marking the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council. He spoke Saturday morning at Washington’s National Cathedral, the event’s third sponsor and chief ecumenical partner.

The President Emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity offered new hope for the unity of Christians in the 21st century. Quoting Isaiah 43, “Behold, I do something new,” the cardinal explained, traditional ecumenism is being transformed by the rise of the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches. Compared to the Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches, these churches are mostly non-dogmatic and less institutionalized expressions of the Gospel.

Is it bad to have something be an institution? Doesn’t that just mean it’s both old and effective? Are we all Rousseauian radicals and romanticists now? Must everything be reduced to nothing before these men are satisfied?

Yes. It must.

These younger, growing churches are more emotional in their worship styles and more voluntarist in their organization. Their members don’t so much belong to a church, as members of the older churches do, but choose their churches. In that respect they represent a contemporary social development in which religious identities are more transitory and church boundaries more porous.

All churches must face that porosity as a sign of the times, Kasper suggested; and the older churches must examine themselves as to what they can learn from the younger Evangelical and Pentecostal ones. The growing importance of Evangelicals and Pentecostals, he suggested, will re-shape and renew 21st century ecumenism.

This is Christian leadership? The emotions of the times drive the Church. The Church doesn’t drive the times…unless something really bad happens. Then it’s the Church’s fault. Right, Diarmuid?

Can the doctrine. Shelve the rubrics. Make everything voluntary. Be porous.

The rise of the Evangelicals and Pentecostals, the cardinal said, constitutes a fourth stage in the history of the churches. The first was the divergence of the Oriental churches from the Mediterranean churches (Greek and Latin) after the Councils of Nicea and Chalcedon. These ancient churches of the Middle East, which lay beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, never accepted the doctrines of the great councils, and so are sometimes called Non-Chalcedonian.

The second phase was the break of the Orthodox East from the Latin West in the Great Schism in 1054. The third was the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, which split Western Christianity into Protestant and Catholic branches.

Look to the history of schism and heresy for guidance. There’s a magisterium Cardinal Kasper can obey.

In a Breitbart report presidential candidate and Hillary scourge, Carly Fiorina, takes us down memory lane to a time when the Middle East was not a living Hell, when Islam wasn’t conquering the West, and ancient Christian enclaves were protected. After reminding voters that Hillary’s record is mainly one of hype and failure, she makes a few helpful suggestions.

“I would do very specific things. First, instead of having a Camp David conference to talk our Arab allies into a bad deal with Iran, I would have had a Camp David conference to talk with our Arab allies about how we can support them to fight ISIS. Let me give you very specific examples. The Kurds have been asking us to arm them for three years, we still have not. The Jordanians have been asking us to provide them with bombs and materiel. We know King Abdullah of Jordan, I’ve known him for many years. He took the appropriate leadership steps when a Jordanian pilot was burned alive. He was here in this country asking us for bombs and materiel, we haven’t provided him with any of them. He’s now looking to China for that. The Egyptian president, a very brave and pious Muslim, who has said there is a cancer in the heart of Islam, has asked us to share intelligence. We are not. The Turks have asked us to help them topple Bashar al-Assad, we are not. There are a whole set of things that we’ve been asked to do by our allies who know this is their fight, and we’re not doing any of them.”

Assad is the enemy of ISIS and ISIS is the enemy of Christ, so it’s hard to see why we should bolster an Islamist tyrant like Turkey’s Erdogan by attacking Syria. Still it’s hopeful to hear someone willing to support protectors of Christians and other historic American allies here and there for a change.

At the Register Edward Pentin has the somewhat frightening report of a progressive ‘shadow synod’ being driven from Germany.

A one-day study meeting — open only to a select group of individuals — took place at the Pontifical Gregorian University on Monday with the aim of urging “pastoral innovations” at the upcoming Synod of Bishops on the Family in October.

Around 50 participants, including bishops, theologians and media representatives, took part in the gathering, at the invitation of the presidents of the bishops’ conferences of Germany, Switzerland and France — Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Bishop Markus Büchel and Archbishop Georges Pontier.

One of the key topics discussed at the closed-door meeting was how the Church could better welcome those in stable same-sex unions, and reportedly “no one” opposed such unions being recognized as valid by the Church.

Participants also spoke of the need to “develop” the Church’s teaching on human sexuality and called not for a theology of the body, as famously taught by St. John Paul II, but the development of a “theology of love.”

I guess when you spend most of your adult life pleasing false superiors, then later on simply shuttling from one catered event to another, handled by servants and office help; your judgment can get skewed. In Germany if you rise to cardinal, in effect you become a permanent bureaucrat at the top of a state-funded empire with few hard demands upon your leadership or expenses. You also have tremendous leverage.

One Swiss priest discussed the “importance of the human sex drive,” while another participant, talking about holy Communion for remarried divorcees, asked: “How can we deny it, as though it were a punishment for the people who have failed and found a new partner with whom to start a new life?”

Marco Ansaldo, a reporter for the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica, who was present at the meeting, said the words seemed “revolutionary, uttered by clergymen.”

French Biblicist and Ratzinger Prize-winner Anne-Marie Pelletier praised the dialogue that took place between theologians and bishops as a “real sign of the times.” According to La Stampa, another Italian daily newspaper, Pelletier said the Church needs to enter into “a dynamic of mutual listening,” in which the magisterium continues to guide consciences, but she believes it can only effectively do so if it “echoes the words of the baptized.”

The meeting took the “risk of the new, in fidelity with Christ,” she claimed. The article also quoted a participant as saying the synod would be a “failure” if it simply continued to affirm what the Church has always taught.

Pentin’s revealing piece full of greasy slogans and Leftist organs continues, but it’s safe to say this isn’t the kind of thing Mass-going faithful Catholics subsidize. Dirty churchmen such as these can only be funded with dirty money. Why must we all now be plagued with their abuse?